Save the children... and yourself shareable

Entry/Exit Tickets

• Used to set a stage, anchor a lesson or review

• A feedback point during or after a lesson to pull out information

• They can be in class checks for understanding, reviews and even homework.

• Used to put questions to you

• You can ensure you get something from everyone each time.

Bringing yourself into the classroom

• Relevancy and realness (Street Cred)

• An enjoyable and more relaxed atmosphere (for most)

• A hobby, passion or talent you have

• A willingness to share a little of ourselves and use it to build relationship and teach.

Vote with your feet

• Position and movement

• Decisions and discussion• Divide and conqueror – both sides vote a representative to speak for them.

Both sides speak and there is an opportunity for students to re-select their sides.

• Human Graphs• Age or dates

• Height

• Preferences or talents

Concentric Circles

• A great preview activity

• Inner and outer circles, opposite directions.

• Random stops and sharing

• Target in the Middle• The center is the expert knowledge area

• One step represents a certain amount of knowledge

• As they move closer to the middle, you get another graph of knowledge to help you know where they are on this subject

Target in the Middle

• Form a single circle

• Use a list of queries to have students decide their own level of “expertise” or mastery

• They step inward in accordance to their level of comfort and confidence with the idea or concepts

Randomness

• The law of equity and fairness often creates opportunities for student to learn to shut off during instruction.

• Round robins and step by step participation can even dictate when you student will be engaged and when they have permission to shut off

Dice and Randomness

• Gaming Dice – 30, 20, 12, 10, 8, 6, 4 sided

• Turns and decision making

• Numbered chairs/students• Rotate the numbers to keep it random

• Student participation, instead of having a student decide who’s next, they roll the dice and let it decide.

• Used to pick on board selections of questions, essays

• Used to select on a matrix tasks or assessments

Different Modes for Randomness

• Unknown terms

• Ticket System – at the end, all must have at least one ticket

• Teams of two or three

• Not only talk about, but classify or place in ordinal/cardinal/date sequence on the board

• Homework Vocabulary

• Written only response

• Silent response by entire class, all answer the question

Questioning

• We can thank Socrates for this method and Plato for writing it down. • Socratic method

• Open

• Closed

• Partial Open/Closed/Guiding Questions

• Bouncing/Bounding questions

• Rebounding and randomness

• 5 Why’s – getting to the roots

Questioning

• Incite and start the mind

• Allow for wrong answers at first, encourage risk taking

• Guide your students through the first few times.

Story telling

A Kinesthetic-Visual-Audio-Emotional –Aesthetic method of teaching

1. For use with any series of facts, events or parts that are related.

2. Easier to use when a single element is present throughout the series.

3. Focuses on the dynamics of presentation and acting.

4. Repetition is the key!

Story Telling• Several modes –

• Teacher Led where the teacher lines up actors and guides then through all movements.

• Student-Teacher corroborative – Both teacher and students develop the story line together.

• Student Led story-line – student develop the entire storyline and present it in class given a list of elements to portray Visually, Kinesthetically and Audibly.

• Key players are needed to help get it off the ground. This is the time to get the active talkers involved in learning.

• This is noisy and can sometimes take a bit of time to set up. Props are excellent in representing concepts or idea.

Story Telling

• Some ideas for story-lines

• Science – Parts of the cell talk about having the best jobs in the cell. (The mitochondria = powerhouse or muscleman). Life cycle of a frog.

• Math – Fractions break down the whole. Word based Questions where one or more variables change.

• Social Studies – Any biography or war. The rise and fall of Napoleon.

• English – Parts of describing what they do (in fact conjunction junction is a method of this approach). Watch the Reduced Shakespeare Companies version of his entire works.

Story Telling

• Start with a subject that is easily broken down into basic elements.

• Choose a visual, kinesthetic an audio anchor for each element.

• Set up the timeline and rehearse. This works very well with poetry or music.

• Have students repeat each element and action every time they are mentioned.

Story Telling (cont.)

• Start with the 1st element and always repeat all elements when you add on.

• Make sure you have a writing prompt at the end to help solidify the story.

• DI Approach- students could improve the dialogue, create poems, songs or other visual cues.

• If students create their own, you could have more than one team develop their own approach, therefore you have multiple examples of the same story.

Synectics

• A concept that is brought to knowledge through a comparison of like and unlike characteristics.

• A Revolution is like a Lover’s Quarrel

• A Verb is like an Athlete

• Photosynthesis is like breathing

• Economies of scale is like Wal-Mart

Process

• Modeled by teacher first.

• Like and unlike characters are listed and discussed

• Student then create their own allegory with their own list of likes and un-likes.

• Students then write their own definition of the given term

• They compare their definition with the “book”

Dynamic Tension

• Athletes and performers get experience and training in how to be ready to perform on demand. Few others ever get this preparation.

• Tension, like Eustress, can motivate and engage the brain. Careful! Too much shuts us down, too little does not motivate.

Hot Seat

• Dynamic Tension and teamwork

• A single person has the responsibility of answering

• Limited resources that build, or can be called upon (think Who Wants to be a Millionaire?”)

• The person in the seat MUST be the one to answer, all others whisper their inputs to them.

Extempore (Bowl of Knowledge)

• Take your vocabulary words, simple to complete math problems, parts of an item studied (anatomy, botany, etc.) and place them on same sized slips of paper or cards.

• Please the cards in a bowl or other container

• Students select the item and that is what they get to discuss for 2 minutes, write about or becomes an element in a project or team task.

• You can play this all day!